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Monday, August 29, 2016

Earlier this month, Google released a great update to Classroom to help keep Parents/Guardians informed of class assignments and announcements for their students in Classroom.

Teachers can enter the Parents/Guardians email address in the Student section of classroom where it says to “Invite Guardians”. You should easily see if their email address is already in because they signed up in another class. Even if the email address is in, you still have to Invite them. Parents/Guardians will need a Google account too.

The easiest way to get the Parent/Guardian email address is to just use a Google Form. Ask for their name, student name, and parent/guardian email address. This should be a very quick process. Once all emails are in, you can click the "Email All Guardians" button to send out all of the invitations.

Parents/Guardians will receive an email asking them if they Accept the Invitation or not. They should be able to see all of their invitations at once for all Classrooms their student is in.

Once they have accepted the Invitation, they should get a summary email at the end of the week or daily, depending on which option they pick, related to every Classroom that their student is in and that they accepted. While they will not be able to see the actual assignments, they will be able to talk to their student about them and know what is coming up as every announcement and assignment that was posted that week should show up.

This tool is not designed to let the Parent/Guardian into every aspect of Classroom but give them a heads up about what is happening. The real conversations should happen between the student and Parent/Guardian. This will improve communication while also helping to ensure the correct conversations happen, between student and Parent/Guardian and less so between Teacher and Parent/Guardian.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Google released some great updates this week to get ready for the new school year. You can easily annotate assignments in the mobile Classroom app, add parent/guardian emails to send weekly reports from Classroom, create Topics for sorting in Classroom, and add images to options in multiple choice or similar questions in Google Forms. You can find the post explaining the updates, and a couple others, at http://googleforeducation.blogspot.com/2016/08/taking-learning-beyond-classroom-walls.html but you can also watch the videos below to see what the updates look like.